ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 9, 1996 TAG: 9601100108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
The best gift I received after having a baby almost two years ago came from my friend Mariana - a lawyer in a previous life, now a stay-at-home mother of three and a devoted community volunteer.
She looked at me knowingly as I held my swaddled infant son. I hadn't yet thought of returning to work. But Mariana was way ahead of me when she offered these kind words: ``When he gets sick and you have to work, call me and I'll watch him.''
Any mother who's ever awakened to a feverish child at 3 in the morning, then stayed up the rest of the night worrying about him - and worrying about missing the next day's work - knows the drill.
First, there's the consultation with the spouse: Is it his turn to stay home or yours? Or if you're lucky enough to have Grandma nearby, can she be called in?
Then, if it's your turn to stay home, there's the tenuous tip-toe around the boss: Do you offer to come in late after your husband's home from work, or do you promise to make up the work on Saturday? Or, if your job is less flexible (read: lower-paying, no benefits), do you have no choice but to take the day off without pay and hope it's there waiting for you the next day?
Even the high-powered struggle. During a ``Women in the Media'' panel at Hollins College last year, network-TV reporter Ann Compton revealed the advice she gives to female colleagues who are just learning to juggle life on the fast track with life on the mommy track.
When your baby gets sick, she tells them, call the boss and say you're sick - not the baby. That way, it's less likely to be held against you later.
Roanoke County native Lisa Bailey never had to worry about juggling child care. She had it all figured out.
Bailey captured front-page headlines Dec. 23 when a Roanoke judge ruled that her Cloverdale employer was legally justified when it fired her during a doctor-ordered pregnancy-complication leave in the summer of 1994.
Six weeks after delivering a healthy daughter, Bailey's suit claimed, the boss explained her sudden dismissal by telling her that ``her place was at home with the child, that babies get sick sometimes and Bailey would have to miss work to care for her child, and that he needed someone more dependable.''
In other words: He needed someone who wasn't a mother.
Bailey says he never even inquired about her child-care plan or sick-child backup arrangement. ``My mother and grandmother - all my family lives in Roanoke and they were going to watch Ashley, even when she got sick,'' she said by telephone last week.
``I would have never had to miss work, not one day.''
In other words: Bailey's extended-family baby-sitting situation was every working woman's dream.
So who's at fault here?
Not her employer, Scott-Gallaher Inc.
According to Neanderthal Law in Virginia - the same state that's telling welfare mothers they must work - Lisa Bailey is the problem. Not because she's a woman, but because she's a mother.
Virginia law does ban firings on the basis of gender. But it doesn't protect women's jobs when women do what only they can do: have babies.
So, according to Neanderthal Law in Virginia - the same state that wrestles perennially with the abortion issue - Lisa Bailey's choice wasn't whether to work or to stay at home. It was whether to terminate her baby or keep her job. She just didn't know it at the time.
Remember, she thought she had it all figured out - the baby-sitting arrangements, even the sick-child backup plan.
Her lawyer, Terry Grimes, says Ashley Bailey will be more than 2 years old by the time the Virginia Supreme Court decides whether it will hear her mother's appeal.
The Baileys, meanwhile, had to move to Florence, S.C., because Lisa couldn't find work in the Roanoke area. With only her husband working, they were struggling to pay the rent.
A month ago, she landed a fairly secure state job in South Carolina. Her daughter Ashley attends a nearby day-care center, where - big surprise here - she picks up germs and gets sick.
``I've already missed two days of work because she had a temperature,'' Bailey says. ``But other people here have children and they know how it is, and they're real good about it.''
Her husband's parents are in the area, but they live almost 40 miles away. ``They would watch her if they could,''she says. ``But both of them work.''
Lisa Bailey never expected to make headlines. She'd never been in court before, never been fired from a job before, never even asked (or received, she says) a raise during the five years she worked for the Cloverdale construction-equipment company.
``This could really blow up into something big,'' she says, admitting that it's all ``a little scary.''
``The only reason I'm pursuing this is because I think that as a woman it isn't right. If I never get anything from it, I want employers to know they can't do women like that.''
And she wants women to know that we might not have it figured out as well as we think.
Not in Virginia anyway.
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